Social Network Analysis with NetworkX: A Gentle Introduction




How do streaming platforms like Netflix recommend the perfect movie for your evening? How can we optimize player positioning in sports like soccer? How can we identify fraudulent activities in financial networks? How can we predict a match in dating apps like Tinder?

All these challenges have the same solution: Social Network Analysis.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a powerful data science field that allows to explore the intricate relationships within a network of entities, discovering hidden patterns and capturing insights. Network entities can be everything: they can be people on a social network like Instagram, websites on the internet, or even sport teams in a tournament network.

In the following sections, I will help you understand what are networks in data science, I will describe the most common types, and I will implement several algorithms to extract valuable information from the networks.

All the theoretical parts will be combined with practical examples. You will find several Python code snippets to familiarize yourself with the NetworkX Python library.